It’s halftime: our 2026 crypto predictions, six months on
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[Read the full mid-year check-in →]
Six months into the year, where does the digital asset economy stand? Our State of crypto 2026: mid-year update takes the ten predictions we published last December and revisits them impartially, providing a clear and grounded view of where the market actually stands – not where we hoped it would be.
Our overarching prediction was that 2026 would be the year crypto made the shift from narrative to fundamentals. We believed that four factors would be the driving force behind this change: structural inflows into regulated exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and exchange-traded products (ETPs), enterprise adoption of stablecoins, the tokenization of commodities and pre-IPO companies, and new onchain use cases moving from concept to scale.
At half time, the picture is more nuanced than we anticipated.
Two calls look to be landing ahead of schedule:
- Our prediction that prediction markets would reach $100 billion in yearly traded volume is tracking ahead of even our own expectations. They've recorded $57.5 billion through the end of May – more than half the full-year target and over ten times the volume of the same period last year. On the current run-rate alone, the $100 billion mark falls around the start of Q4. We doubt it will take that long. The catalysts that fuel event trading are stacked in the second half: the FIFA World Cup is now underway, and November brings US midterm elections for both the House and Senate.
- We predicted that most scaling solutions – Layer 2s or L2s – would not survive 2026 as market share concentrated among a handful of dominant players. That call has landed, and in February it received an unexpected endorsement from Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, who declared that the rollup-centric roadmap "no longer makes sense."
The rest of our predictions are largely delayed, but not derailed. Tokenized commodities are gaining relevance with gold and energy at the center of geopolitical hedging, and pre-IPO markets are moving toward the mainstream as a landmark pipeline builds – from SpaceX to Anthropic. To find what this means for the digital asset economy in the second half of 2026, download our full report.
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